From the indictment:
>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.
>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.
Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
So what's your actual argument here? Is it
1. whatever he did isn't wire fraud?
2. whatever he did is wire fraud, but wire fraud shouldn't be prosecuted, similar to how crashing a car isn't prosecuted?
3. whatever he did is criminal and should be prosecuted, but trump is abusing his pardoning powers so every other white collar criminal should be off the hook?
I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.
In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.
Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.
I guess the state prosecution just disagreed on this matter, I'm assuming that, within their specialty, they take the top N cases and dismiss the other pettier cases, and in this case this case made the cut according to the workload capacity of the fraud prosecution workforce.
In raw stolen amounts, it's not small at all, it's like 8 million dollars, which is an amount that can be argued to be worth one or two lives, it may be the cost of complex surgeries and health insurance, or the cost for good nutrition, living space, so it could be argued that this person is taking those resources away from someone else, no matter how inert or ridiculous the means by which they stole that money may be. If someone defrauds 500 million dollars by impersonating a clown, the optics of defrauding 500 million should prevail over the optics of "putting someone in jail for being a clown".
Pointing a gun in someone's face is also not in the public interest.
Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin? It's not even clear to me without diving into the actual case where he went from getting an edge to engaging in the alleged crime. Or what he could have done differently to preclude criminal prosecution but could have still resulted in a civil case.
More importantly, why should he have to go to prison? Why don't you make that moral argument instead of engaging in such a misread of my position.
You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.
In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).
This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.
I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.
[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.
Also, this is not (just) about Spotify; all streaming platforms have some sort of subscription and/or ad revshare, and were abused by the same fraudster.
Per the original case: "Music can be streamed through platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music... SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms that he could use to stream songs".
He used fraud to get a payout from Spotify. It's analogous to forging a check to get the bank to pay you money which you aren't owed.
What does this even mean? Only crimes against things are "regulated" should be prosecuted? Or "public interest", however vaguely that's defined?
>Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
Other artists. The subscriber/ad revenues are divided pro-rata (unclear whether it's by subscriber or across all subscribers), so by streaming a bunch of fake music, it's displacing the streaming minutes of other artists, ever so slightly.
Moreover, even if it is spotify that's losing money, how is it less in the "public interest" than banks? For the sake of argument let's subtract the threat of violence, and assume they hacked an ATM or something. Would that suddenly not be in the "public interest" to prosecute the offenders? Why should multi-billion dollar banks deserve more sympathy than multi-billion dollar tech companies, especially for crimes that in all likelihood won't lead to either company's demise?
I take it based on your other comments that the distinction between criminal and civil proceedings is suitably apparent to you?
If so I struggle to understand then why this leap is so hard for you.
You and I can have a private dispute without the government getting involved as a prosecuting party, yes? Banks are highly regulated because the state has sought fit to take an interest in how they are run. Roughly, because if a bank defrauds its numerous depositors this incurs a societal cost. Similarly, violence is also regulated, as it is inimical to the state's requisite monopoly on violence to tolerate private expressions of this power.
I simply do not get the intuition here that it is in the public interest to put this person in prison in the same way the intuition may surface in these other cases. If you disagree that is fine, but then I'm curious to hear where your intuition on this private vs public interest line is. Of course it is somewhat vague. If the public interest was clear and obvious to everyone electoral politics would not exist.
Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
I take the burden of depriving a fellow citizen of their liberty in a free society rather seriously.
Do you? If so, please explain to me how you alleviate yourself of this burden in this case. I'm open to being persuaded.
If you can't clearly articulate what the "public interest" means, it just feels like this whole thing is just a long winded way for you to say that we shouldn't be prosecuting non-violent crimes, unless the victim is sufficiently sympathetic, in which case we throw the book at them. That's no way to run a justice system.
>Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
You can make the same arguments about the questionable utility of incarceration for violent crimes too. The typical arguments against incarceration works equally well for violent crimes as they do for non-violent ones.
Less than 1/10 of restitution is ever paid out. When you send someone to jail, especially for a long time, you’re basically guaranteeing that they aren’t going to make good on any victim compensation.
So what does it mean for the movie trope where a hacker steals fractions of cents from everyone's bank account, leading him to get millions in loot? By any meaningful measure that didn't hurt anyone's bottom line, so that ought to be fine, right? Even if you think this is somehow okay, what about the "death by a thousands cuts" problem, where a trillion dollar company gets scammed 1000 times, which becomes a deleterious amount? Do you have to prosecute people at some point? How would that work?
To me, this falls under the category of white collar crime. I'm OK with white collar criminals serving time. It's not like this case is in a gray area. It's clearly a conspiracy to commit fraud on a large scale.
I get where you're coming from. It's not stealing. But, setting up fake accounts in order to trick Spotify into sending him money is clearly fraud.
To justify imprisonment (rather than purely monetary penalties or civil judgements) you really have to look at the relative scale of harm and the type of harm inflicted. Imprisonment doesn’t always make sense, there are many nonviolent crimes where a purely monetary penalty would be more appropriate. For one thing, imprisonment can prevent people from paying back the victim.
The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.
This was essentially money-laundering at scale.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/remember-spotify-fake...
And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.
Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.
What does adding a prison sentence accomplish?
Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.
Is "forfeit what you've got and go to jail for 18 months" harsher than that? I'd pick the one that let me get a clean start after.
And in the case that it wasn't spent, and by fine you mean as a replacement for any forfeiture, not in addition, then sibling comment has a great point that "if you get caught, you just gotta give it back" is an incentive to commit fraud, not one against committing fraud.
Prison for theft is so brutally cruel. Who was really harmed by this once he paid the money back? A line item in some megacorp that was lower for awhile?
No one felt anxiety or pain, the megacorp probably barely noticed. Pay them back with interest, move on.
Obviously the calculus changes for violent thefts, or breaking into someone's home. Those cause real emotional impacts to people. Of course simply returning those items doesn't make someone whole.
Don't focus on the streaming revenue angle. Focus on the fact that this was a giant money-laundering exercise, allowing him to turn stolen debit cards into real money.
They stope millions of dollars through fraud and deception.
That absolutely deserves a prison sentence
I hate this timeline.
> ‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.
Very disappointing.
I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.
Which of these are fraud:
a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
>a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
Not doing something is generally considered okay, even if it decreases someone else's revenue. eg. saying that a given product is a scam and not worth the money (assuming it's true). Same with skipping ads (eg. TiVo)
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
>d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
Legal, because the whole point of advertising is to convince people to do something, even if it costs someone else money (eg. drugs, which might cost your insurance provider money). Where you might get into trouble is if the actions turn out to be fraud, eg. telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes, or setting up a kickback scheme (might be tortious interference). Again, going back to the drug example, it's pretty intuitive. Advertising a drug? That's fine. Telling people to buy your drug, just so they can chuck it into the trash, for the sole purpose of enriching yourself? Probably illegal.
How is that fundamentally different from netflix or youtube auto-playing something after a video finishes, knowing that a large percentage of the people who started the first video won't be present or attentive to the second, in order to artificially inflate views for the content they're promoting.
2. caveat emptor. how youtube works and how ads are played is hardly secret information, so accusations that google is deceiving advertisers (not just providing a subpar product) is hard to make.
3. people have tried suing companies for this, but they were over securities fraud rather than deceiving ad buyers. No idea how successful they were though. it's worth noting that suing for securities fraud is easier because unlike with advertising, you have to declare risk factors, hence why every company's prospectus lists all potential list factors under the sun.
The intent of auto play on YouTube is not to defraud ad agencies
d.1) convince humans and they use their main account
d.2) convince humans and they use and alt account
I think the resolution to my question is: it’s still fraud if humans do it, like you said. And it makes me wonder if more things should be considered fraud like paying people with free products for Amazon reviews or purchasing GH stars.
you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been
most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.
I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.
I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.
Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?
Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.
Maybe not legally, but morally... yeah? It's definitely gross, in the sense that I would like to see it eradicated as a system.
"Cheating" systems benefits people in the short term but corrupts the, like, fabric of society in the long term ... when cheating is normalized and you have to cheat to get ahead then everything kinda vaguely sucks all the time. People often end up in a posture vis-á-vis big corporations where it feels like cheating them is morally okay because the corporations are cheating in a systemic way, or otherwise don't deserve moral recognition because they're too diffuse and machine-like... I empathize with that. But we shouldn't turn around and therefore _not_ interpret the cheating as cheating. It's still bad. But if you do it "at scale" and make a business model out of it and then get caught... well you're an idiot. I agree that it feels weird that this was a prison sentence instead of a big fine. I imagine it's a question of magnitude: it was more than skimming off a profit, it was basically at the scale of 'criminal enterprise' and we ... don't like those.
> I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.
It's obviously a question of what you have the agents doing.
> And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.
I agree.
If your scheme doesn't extract value, nor costs anything to other parties, there is no victims, you can get away with it. Even if policies say no. The risk is termination of service.
Skipping ads is a loss of opportunity for advertisers. But they don't get extracted money. They may not like it, but they can continue to fish elsewhere and aren't being siphoned because you skip their ads.
If you spawn websites and farm fake viewers to scam ad networks, you are engaged in criminal activity. Not because you fake viewing ads. But because you extracted a profit of this activity which was extracted from another party (via deceits).
I suspect the case hinged on that, and everything else was legal, albeit part of the fraud, and was included as a complete description of the scheme.
To be fair, I'm guessing he couldn't have created the scale of fake accounts without debit card fraud, but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.
But I was responding to the comment touching on more general seemingly ambiguous situations.
What makes Terms of Service / contract violations a different case than deceit for financial profit. Why is one tolerated by justice but the other condemned as criminal activity.
But you are right, debit card fraud, wire fraud and the likes are clearly defined as criminal.
Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.
But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.
Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...
The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.
Using bots to automate listening to his own songs was likely fraudulent too because he was being awarded royalties. If his songs had been monetized in some other way I'm not sure what he did would be fraud.
I don't think creating multiple accounts is, even if it's in violation of the TOS.
If that was the case, anyone who signs up for multiple accounts on a website/app to get multiple coupons/bonuses/etc... would be committing fraud.
None of this is close to firing a gun pointed at someone's head.
They very clearly made an example of him given the sentencing, but I don't think they were confident about all the charges in the indictment based on the plea agreement and the crazy high succuss rates in federal criminal cases.
That seems to me like it would be easy to prove it is fraud in a US court.
Edit: interesting it does look like there must be an object of the fraud, likely to prevent the law from being used broadly to punish lying.
Collecting money from a platform by making bots play songs you created is fraud.
Making bots listen to a song without any financial incentive is not fraud.
Aaron was threatening power structures, not enriching them.
Skip is fine. Blocking with third party tools is a breach of contract as a consumer, but not fraud nor a crime.
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume.
If they individually decide to do this, then it's 1000 times fine or 1000 instances of breach of contract. If they get together and do this collectively, or are instructed to do so by one person, it starts to encroach on civil conspiracy.
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
If you convince them to play the songs on the basis of the music, that's the very object of the contract.
If you convince them to do so on the basis of the ads, presumably you incentivize them with money if they listen to the song, then it's fraud. It's arguable of course, but if you are paying the listeners, then it obviously makes the value of the ads 0, you are knowingly selling something that has 0 value and charging a comission for that sale.
>d) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them to skip the ads
d) This is weird because your revenue would be 0 in this case. But arguably you would be benefitting from the service of music distribution without paying for it with the cost of serving ads along your music. It's a completely different situation than the one in the OP, it's more like piracy, less like fraud.
Again if by skip you mean a service provider interface, then that's fine, I'm assuming you mean block with ublock or some third party reverse engineered thing that's forbidden by ToS.
>e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
e) Of course this is fraud, I think it's obvious to you and you are just positing this as part of the obvious end of the slippery slope, so it's not worth explaining why. But just as a teaser, it involves agreeing and breaching 1000 contracts and creating 1000 fake identities, so identity fraud at least!
>(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Regardless of the specific case, in general there's many cases where regulation attacks only some scenarios which cause a damage, and that's fine. For example drunk driving, driving too fast, and blinking at the wrong moment all might have the same consequence, but we only regulate the first and the second.
>Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
Haven't read that, but this is strictly not securities fraud, just fraud.
Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless. So my angle with the comment is to talk about the spectrum and understand why people so clearly see (e) as criminal relative to the other situations when the harm or effective outcome is the same.
We seem generally okay with deception until it is used for personal enrichment. Why is that?
I think I said this already, but in the cases of contracts and breach, it's a matter of perspective to interpret whether the gains being defrauded are gaining the consideration of the victim, or in keeping the consideration of the perpetrator, and what you are doing is taking the most charitable of the interpretations, when I think it's very obvious that of both interpretations, the most damaging should be considered.
Example, a rare baseball card is sold for 50M dollars, the 50M dollars are never wired, you would argue that it's just a stupid baseball card, when I think we should consider that 5M were stolen. The inverse scenario would be the same thing, if the 50M are wired, but the perpetrator keeps the baseball card, you would argue that it's just a baseball card, but I would say that it's fraud for 50M.
Market value is often considered, in which case it depends on third party estimations as for the true value of the thing. Which in the case of the streaming service, I don't think there's an overpricing here at all. 80M fake plays at 8M USD is like 10 cents per ad, maybe you can argue that it really was 1 cent per ad and the sentence should be lower at 800k? But it's a very weak position to argue on subjective grounds that the asset being traded is morally not something that people should be going to jail for. It would require every trial to judge not only the contract and the facts of the case but what the object of the contract was and whether it is 'serious' enough, effectively carving out some assets as 'serious' like food and oil, while others are unserious and subject to fraud, like music and software. You are effectively arguing against our trade in a way by devaluing intangible assets whose value and contracts we rely on to make a living.
I am uncomfortable with the idea that something that is allowed if you pay humans is also illegal if you use bots. That feels like it deserves more discussion. And it feels like while there is a clear crime here, it’s also a problem that the ad and streaming industry have a model that reduces one stream to one human. I don’t want to worry about jail time for automating tasks with bots and accidentally falling on the wrong side of some industry’s really bad/dated monetization model and having it look like fraud. That isn’t the case here, but it encroaches.
To reiterate, this would also be a crime if humans were paid, although it would be easier to defend in court because it CAN be argued that the ad placement was delivered, whereas with bots it CANNOT be argued that the ads were placed.
However prosecution CAN argue if humans are paid, that this is fraud, and just replacing bots with humans in this case wouldn't materially change the legal facts, it would maybe make less economical sense, and give plausible deniability, but the objective was to defraud, to obtain money without providing the agreed upon services.
For example if the perpetrator had hired people from the philippines to make 50 accounts each, and used a proxy network to fake their locations so they effectively WATCH ads more than once and from locations that were clearly not corresponding to the intent, then those facts would bring the case closer to the the fraud that occured with bots.
It would definitely be harder to argue, but it could still be fraud, but it's a hypothetical that I'm not sure why is being brought, I feel it detracts, but definitely the fact that humans were involved hypothetically wouldn't automatically make this not fraud.
I'm curious, which is why I brought it up. In my worldview humans should have a right not to be advertised to and all advertising should require consent. Even today, humans can ignore and block ads without committing ad fraud. So I don't see a difference between humans and bots consuming ad-laced content. --because no guarantees can be made as to wether an ad will be "consumed" or not, only show
Since I don't distinguish a difference, I wanted to discuss whether the case at any level hinged on the bot factor. That's all.
What I do value is the ability for institutions to control who uses their space/services. So I support regulating and punishing inappropriate use/access. In this case that would be bot usage of Spotify in ways that breaks the contract you agreed upon when you signed up to use their service.
But there's a difference between "this person committed fraud and it's criminally bad because something was fraudulently obtained from advertisers", and "this person breached their contract with spotify and possibly committed criminal computer abuse etc". So it's semantics around who is being defrauded.
I lean fairly redistributive but through consensus and governance, not through fraud.
It was more about making sure we don’t punish people for something that would otherwise be legal if they paid humans to do it but instead used bots. And it doesn’t seem like that was the case here after more discussion panned out.
And also that we don’t ignore the minor but still real part of this that’s due to a really poor assumption that “one stream == one human”.
And if you think skipping ads means the advertising agency gets screwed you are kind of showing ignorance...
Advertisers are fine with paying for ads even of some users turn the volume down when they come on. They are absolutely not fine with paying for ads streamed out into nothingness.
One is a problem for the industry. The other is not.
He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?
> AI
Same sentence even lmao
If so, I think we can save America.
> ... SMITH turned to super intelligence...
Holy shit, we've got ASI?
Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
It was made up one day and that's what govt publications must call it now.
> Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
You get it.
The original purpose of the org was also explicitly defensive, with failing to prevent Pearl Harbor being an explicit influence for improving communication and cooperation between arms of the military through a combined leadership.
It's like recursively, fractally stupid.
What the... OK, I had to check if that language was in the indictment. It's not - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl uses artificial intelligence. It's the press release from the Justice Department dated 6th of October that uses "super intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sent...
Amusingly (and unsurprisingly) their earlier press release dated March 19th calls it "artificial intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-plea...
For example, pump-and-dumping .si domain names or some other asset which connects to the phrase/acronym.
Like going from very successfully robbing banks to robbing convenience stores?
In his speech about it at the UN: "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't. We're gonna find out pretty soon".
That’s the reason why he won’t let anyone see his tax returns.
He shutdown his court case against the BBC rather than open the books to the lawyers.
This is a bloke that failed at running casinos. A business where suckers just hand you their money. And he failed.
He just “ain’t right good” at business but has the ego of The Big Lebowski.
It doesn’t matter if it’s $10B or $59, more is more
I get that politics is a team sport and all, but like the fraud and abuse Pelosi got away with is so infinitesimal compared to the absolute bald-faced grift. Did she "sell" cell-phones and then never deliver? In August alone Trump made a quarter billion dollars in securities trades.
Grow up.
Trump is a fraudster, rapist, thief, and traitor. He is a criminal of the basest sort.
It's a mistake to put them in the same category. It's a matter of kind, not a matter of degree.
That's literally what happened. Thousands of .si domains were bought up before his renaming, and then offered up for millions.
PS: His wife is from Slovenia. I'm sure that's a coincidence...
Laws really are just as effective as boo-boo band-aids aren't they?
I wouldn't be surprised if it was industry-pushed to try to get people used to the idea of "don't question the machine, let us replace you." Are you "super", after all?
SI-generated songs. [Now trump is angry](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-super-intelligence-reb...)
What's a "fake" email account? According to the law, that is. Does that mean that having more than one (let's say) email account might now be considered as "fake", and hence potentially illegal?
Fraud. https://xkcd.com/1494/
However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.
So the bots he actually used were most likely illegal (though it's true other bots might not be).
Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?
Fraud in larger scale and using other people's computers.
Was it ever prosecuted with the same vigour?
It's a corporation so I'm gonna bet no.
A class-action lawsuit is "still being fought at the pleading stage" [1]. The way this often goes is prosecutors will watch the discovery in that case to decide if anyone committed a crime.
[1] https://openclassactions.com/lawsuits/paypal-honey-affiliate...
>> there was no criminal prosecution, just a lawsuit
Like, come on. (This reminds me of the folks on HN confidently concluding Elizabeth Holmes wouldn’t see the inside of a jail all the way through sentencing.)
Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?
But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users have take on responsibility for representing that they will abide by the listed whims. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user does something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.
In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.
No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.
> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
the department of justice made a sophisticated music-themed plot around it because the only crime they had was too dumb
You don't even need to be a major corporation to get away with it. You can be an individual if you have the right connections.
I believe what this guy did with the music streaming was wrong. But I also think whatever punishment he gets should be shared by someone who, say, lies about their 500 active user worthless company to unload it for tens of millions of dollars.
But one of these people is going to jail for a year and a half and one is preparing to launch a trillion+ dollar IPO.
"“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."
This state attorney does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the box or I don't get it.
1. I don't see any possible way how he could have stolen from the fans of the artists.
2. If he stole from the artists, then this must be a fixed amount of money in the pot and the slice of the piece of the cake gets smaller, if more people withdraw. There might be such an arrangement between artists and the streaming provider but I don't know details.
“Royalty payments are made proportionately to musicians and songwriters from a pool of funds. As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”
If you and I have a contract that I’ll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, it’s pretty clear that you have defrauded me.
If you ignore the keyword optimizing buzz-catcher press release, thats the crime right there. He used stolen debit card numbers to sign up accounts.
If lying to induce or fulfil a contract were not a crime, someone could sell you a car telling you it has 0km, but it's actually 300km. Or they could sell you a hamburger telling you its made of meat, and it's actually made of soy. Etc..
Selling a song with 100M listens is a lie if you faked those 100M listens, it's not very different from stealing (but it is different)
Fraud
That is what I see with this case. Aside from the debit card thing I am not certain any laws were broken. If making "bots and socks" to manipulate for profit is illegal there is a lot more areas that I would love to see them gone from.
The law doesn't work that way. So much of the law comes down to holistic and subjective tests. It looks at the totality of the evidence. Those tests typically also contain questions that are also tests.
Let me give you an example: the FBI gets access to a site hosting CSAM and, in doing so, they get IP logs. Many of those logs point to US IP addresses. From this they make arrests and prosecutions.
The typical engineer defense is "you can't prove that use of my IP was me", like you could've been hacked. While that's technically true, the law doesn't work on absolute certainty. Investigators and prosecutors will do things like figure out if you were home at the time, if there's any corroborating evidence on any of your devices and so on.
So back to streaming, you look at the totality of the accused's actions. Did he get mass copies of copyrighted music? As BS as IP is (IMHO), stealing it is still a crime. Using services within their ToS isn't a defense. And the fact that you committed a crime probably means you violated the ToS anyway. Dig in there and you'll probably find stuff about not doing things that aren't illegal.
If the debit card fraud wasn't present, and it was instead a group of individuals doing this, I'm not sure if it would end up in criminal court. It could still end up in civil court.
In Kelly vs US [1] a couple of politicians were convicted of wire fraud for closing certain lanes to create a traffic jam for political benefit. It was overturned by the Supreme Court but that gets into interpretive arguments of what the statute means when it says "OR". The law isn't like code. Anyhow, yeah the wire fraud statute really needs to be rewritten or broken down into more appropriate and targeted statutes. But that will never happen because it's a superweapon in its current state.
That's not to say we should encourage lying or botting or whatever else, but they need their own statutes as opposed to a 50s era law which has turned into a catch-all superlaw with really harsh penalties. So in this case exactly what was the crime committed? Terms of service violations aren't illegal, neither is lying to or exploiting companies, neither is running bots. Wire fraud is dragged out exactly in circumstances like this when the government wants a conviction but it's not clear what law was broken, because even if no law was broken, they probably committed wire fraud, because everything is wire fraud.
It's also a highly asymmetric law. For instance Sony famously got the No Man's Sky (video game) people to lie through their teeth about what the game was going to include. They made countless millions of dollars from these lies. That's 100% wire fraud, but because they're a giant company lying and exploiting people 'by wire' is just standard operating procedure, and they didn't even get a slap on the wrist. For that matter all false advertising would be wire fraud, but again that gets back to the point that everything is wire fraud.
I can understand that saying things we don't sincerely mean, and outright lying or being insincere for supposed comedic or dramatic effect, can be utterly misconstrued in a public forum. Sadly, my mind is really conditioned to not even care what are the effects of what I say when I'm typing it into a computer.
I try not to maintain any public social media accounts, and so hopefully my sardonic sense of humor can be contained to friends and allies who sort of understand where I'm coming from.
Is it still a felony worth spending years in prison for? I am speaking practically, not ideologically. The main thing this user did was to exploit advertisers paying out on the world's most gameable metric (exactly as our site would be doing in the above example). Yet that, in and of itself, is not a crime, which is why they ended up relying on wire fraud charges.